Siemens Smart City

No emissions, no car noise, no gridlock. Instead, just acres of parkland and lots of public spaces. Thanks to digital technologies that allow cities to streamline their infrastructures while allowing ever more people to do most everything from home, the smart cities of the future will offer their inhabitants the comforts of metropolitan living combined with the benefits of rural life. That’s why Micha and his family have decided to move back to a city to open a business. What they find is nothing like the cities they grew up in.

Meeting and Eating in a Hologram

In addition to their café and cake business, Micha and Carla also run a so-called holographic studio. There were good economic reasons for opening such a business. Over the years, as global networking expanded, people had increasingly decided to work, shop, and get much of their medical care and entertainment at home. While this radically reduced emissions in urban areas, the downside was that people became increasingly lonely and unhappy – which is where demand for holographic studios came in.

The studios make it possible to sit in a real café or run on a treadmill while meeting other people in virtual space who are doing the same thing. Together in the virtual world, they might then decide to go jogging along the Seine, Tiber or Hudson. For Micha, this is a highly lucrative sideline. The data mat at the entrance of his studio, which identifies members by their gait and weight, already has more than 1,100 annual memberships on record — although the family only opened its COSY franchise a year ago.